The Impacts Of The Vietnam War

This essay will discuss to what degree the media can be blamed for the United States’ loss in the Vietnam conflict ending 1975. It will be based predominantly on key written resources on the subject, but it will also contain - by means of an interview - certain first-hand observations from a Vietnam War veteran.

During the Vietnam War, Americans were greatly influenced by the extensive media coverage of the war. Before the 1960’s and the intensification of the war, public news coverage of military action was constrained heavily by the government and was directed by Government policy. The Vietnam War uniquely altered the perception of war in the eyes of American citizens by bringing the war into their homes. The Vietnam War was the first U.S uncensored war resulting in the release of graphic images and unaltered accounts of horrific events that helped to change public opinion of the war like nothing it had ever been. This depiction by the media led to a separation between the United States government and the press; much of what was reported flouted

Wars are a difficult place to be. “THE VIETNAM WAR transformed a generation” (Roberts 1). With all that happened during the war such as exposure to

The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.

The Vietnam War was, and continues to be, one of America's darkest moments, one that nearly tore the nation apart. In order to stop the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, the United States aided French imperialists and their reoccupation of Vietnam. At first, the U.S took a position of neutrality to both countries, but by early 1947, they began fighting in support of France. This war, lasting over 20 years, became the longest and most unpopular war in the 20th century. Overall, the Vietnam War was detrimental to the United States because it caused a massive debt from the 1960s to the 1990s, turned the American people against their government, and many troops were neglected and despised upon their return.

Vietnam was an entirely new type of war for the United States. It still remains morally and historically problematic in today’s society. The Vietnam War had a tremendous impact on American society and culture, primarily because it was the first war to be televised. The American press played a significant

The Vietnam War had no restrictions on what the media could and couldn’t cover, making a very public war. Journalists from big companies and small towns went to Vietnam to cover what was happening. Some went for the excitement and adventure. Others wanted to be on page one and be part of the exclusive combat correspondent club. These journalists were taking any information they could get and were sending it back to for American people to view. These journalists could even go into North Vietnam, if they had the courage too. Some journalists, based of what they saw, believed that the war was unwinnable. The military ended up blaming the media for the loss because the turned the American people against the troops in Vietnam through the information

By 1968, more than half of the American people relied on television as their principal source of news. What they saw informed, engrossed, and unsettled them. CBS Evening News anchor Harry Reasoner referred to it as “horrors and failures.” The Vietnam War dominated the network newscast as it never had before. Suddenly the war was everywhere. The impact on the American public would indeed be great. It set off a critical reaction to the war within the American media and gave greater credence to arguments against the war that a vocal protest movement had been voicing for some time. The media coverage of the Tet Offensive had a great influence on the eventual outcome of the fighting and its aftermath. Clarence Wyatt, author of Paper

The investigation assesses the media coverage of the Tet Offensive and its impact on American policy concerning the Vietnam War from 1968 until 1969. The investigation evaluates the contrast between media broadcasts and government reports of the war, the effect of the media on the American public, and the effect of American public opinion on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s course of action. Two of the sources, Vietnam and America: A Documented History by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, and The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam by Daniel C. Hallin are examined.

Watching Vietnam: Media and the American People Newspapers, radio and television are all types of media that debated the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1975. For the first time, television showed American citizens what was going on battle after battle in Vietnam. It became one of the most controversial wars that America was ever involved in. Over the span of the war, the government wanted to keep public support for the war. But, it was difficult because the media’s support declined over time.

As more and more troops were being sent to Vietnam, and the casualties began to rise, people began to question the government’s involvement. “Even military troops came to mistrust their government’s reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington’s claims that the war was being won”.(Vietnam War) The Vietnam war was the first war to be broadcast on television. This meant that for the first time the American people were able to see the war instead of just hearing about it on the radio. They were able to see firsthand the soldier’s faces, see the reality of where they were fighting and to see the

Vietnam was a country divided into two by communism in the North and capitalism in the South. The Vietnam War, fought between the years 1959 and 1975, was, in essence, a struggle by nationalists in the north to unify the nation under a communist government. This was a long standing conflict between the two sides that had been occurring for years. It wasn’t until 1959 when the USA, stepped in, on the side of southern Vietnamese, to stop the spread of communism. It was a war that did not capture the hearts and minds of the American people as it was viewed as a war that the US army couldn’t win and so the government lost the peoples support for the war. This ultimately led to the withdrawal of the US army from Vietnam. Some people, like

The Vietnam War certainly left a distaste in the lives of many who have been affected by the war; scholars have become increasingly interested in the interaction between war and public opinion. There have been many scholarly works published on the Vietnam War, but the issue that will be analyzed here is how public opinion changed the course of the war. The first article by Scott Gartner and Gary Segura is titled, “Race, Casualties, and Opinion in the Vietnam War,” it examined how the diverse races within America in combination with the atrocities in the war led to the formation of opinions that were similar in one race but were different in another race. The second article by Paul Burstein and William Freudenburg titled, “The Impact of

It is known media coverage over the decades starting in WWII is dramatically different than how it was during Vietnam

The Vietnam War was one of the most hated wars in United States history, for the primary reasons that we did not win and the draft destroyed countless men, physically and mentally. The end result of the war did not justify the means and this made a lot of people very upset. This war was also the most televised war, showing incredibly gruesome, uncensored images on the evening news at dinner time. The political protest for the